Adding catalogs to Goto / Deep Sky Annotations

[soundfan]

Hi there,

as I'm looking for more interesting DSOs, I found plenty in catalogs like Sharpless or Simeis.

Is it possible to implement those (and / or others) in Sharpcap?

Of cause I searched the forum and found some topics about scriping and custom catalogs, but I'm not into scripting at all.
Perhaps with a step by step tutorial...

Currently I use Skysafari to navigate to those targets but that misses the comfort of Sharpcap stopping the latest live stack, stop guiding, setting the correct name for the target, slew to target, plate solve and resynch, start guiding and start a new live stack.

I know, I might have become a little lazy by the comfortable use of Sharpcap, but that's on you, Robin!

Thanks for any tips in advance.

CS Mike

[Jean-Francois]

Hello Mike,

You can create so much user catalogue as you want.

The catalogue file shall be a text file ending in ".csv".

The syntax is not complicated:

IDs|Names|Type|RA(decimal hours)|Dec(degrees)|VMag|RMax(arcmin)|RMin(arcmin)|PosAngle
HD000319|A1V|Miles|00 07 46.89955|-22 30 30.8173|5.942|||

The RA and DEC coordinates could be now in "deg min arcsec" or in decimal notation.
The RMax, RMin and PosAngle are for modelling the shape of the galaxies and nebula (It is an ellipse).
The character "|" is needed 8 times.

And the last ... the directory "AnnotationCatalogs" has to be created in the following place: C:\Users\*user-name*\AppData\Roaming\SharpCap
Note: if you have several users on the same computer, you need to create the directory for each user.

In the past, I send a message with different links for some user catalogues.

Regards,
Jean-Francois

[Xio1996]

Hi Mike,

Cey42 on Cloudy Nights has created a OneDrive folder of many DSA catalogues submitted on Cloudy Nights. This came out of the discussion thread
here https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/8069 ... nnotation/

OneDrive Link.

https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21A ... A8907ECE6C

Personally, I have switched off all the DSA catalogues in SharpCap and dynamically create a DSA catalogue for the current FOV from a PostgreSQL database JPL and AstroPlanner Catalogues via a small piece of software talking to SharpCap via a Python script and MQTT (kinda weird ). Scripting in SharpCap is pretty cool.

Hopefully, the catalogues help.

Pete

[soundfan]

Thank you Jean-Francois for your "How-To" and thank you Pete for the links!

I managed to implement 4 interesting custom catalogs within 2 minutes following your descriptions.

Simply amazing and amazingly simple!

Now I need to find a Simeis catalog somewhere or create one on my own...

Many thanks again for your help!

CS
Mike

[celvii]

I have made several custom catalogs and inserted them into the AnnotationCatalogs folder.
However, they do not show up at all or only with a partial list of the contents.
I have reviewed the syntax of the information and I am pretty sure its accurate as it looks just like
every one that has been posted.
Example of what I did: M13|NGC 6205 Hercules Globular Cluster|Cluster Globular|16.6947222|36.4611111|4|||
Maybe my file format is off?
I created the catalog in Excel with all the info entered as text in the first column cell and saved it as .csv.
Anybody see anything wrong here?

[admin]

Hi,

check the SharpCap log after you have tried to access the catalog data inside SharpCap, it should record info for files that it has loaded data from and also on any lines that it encountered but could not understand. That info should help work out what isn't quite right about the files.

An example of what you see in a log for a catalog that is being read in - in this case the catalog only has 1 entry - if there were 900 then it would be 'Found 900 valid ...'

Code: Select all

Info    15:06:49.999912 #3  Found 1 valid catalog entries in C:\Users\robin\AppData\Roaming\SharpCap\AnnotationCatalogs\OccStars.csv

An example of what you see when a line is not understood - in this case it's just the heading line of the file, so not important

Code: Select all

Warning 15:06:49.941033 #3  Could not parse text as object catalog entry : IDs|Names|Type|RA(decimal hours)|Dec(degrees)|VMag|RMax(arcmin)|RMin(arcmin)|PosAngle  

Hope this helps,

Robin